Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. A former aide to Margaret Thatcher, Gardiner has served as a foreign policy adviser to two US presidential campaigns. He appears frequently on American and British television, including Fox News Channel, BBC, and Fox Business Network.

Barack Obama faces Armageddon in latest polls

Forget “Snowmageddon”. Washington may be deluged under nearly three feet of snow, but Barack Obama is experiencing a sinking feeling of another kind. The latest US polls, highlighted here by Daniel Foster at The Corner at NRO, are stunningly bad for the president. Frankly, the Titanic’s prospects looked better than Obama’s do today, even after it hit the iceberg.

As Foster points out, three major new polls show the president in serious trouble in the wake of the stunning Massachusetts Senate special election win by Scott Brown. According to the latest Marist survey of registered voters, 47 percent disapprove of Obama’s job performance, while just 44 percent approve. Most worryingly for the White House, support for the president among independents has fallen dramatically, with 57 percent now disapproving of the president, and just 29 percent giving him their backing.

The Marist poll also reveals that a mere 7 percent of voters believe the president has exceeded their expectations. 47 percent believe Obama “has fallen below their expectations”, and just 42 percent say he has “met their expectations”. Significantly, “38 percent think the direction in which Mr Obama is moving the country is for the worse, and 37 percent believe he is changing the nation for the better.”

The latest Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll makes even worse reading for President Obama. According to Rasmussen, just 26 percent of American voters strongly approve of Obama’s job performance, with 41 percent strongly disapproving, for a Presidential Approval Index rating of -15.

Over at Gallup, the outlook on several leading issues facing the president looks exceedingly grim. While the president still maintains a significant lead on Education, and a narrow majority on foreign affairs (with the exception of the Iranian issue), he is facing staggering public opposition on three critically important domestic policy issues. The percentage of Americans who disapprove of his job performance on healthcare, the economy, and the federal budget, stands at 60 percent, 61 percent, and 64 percent respectively – an almost two to one majority on health and the economy and an exact two to one margin on the budget deficit.

All three polls demonstrate growing disillusionment across the United States with Barack Obama’s presidency. As the Real Clear Politics Average of US polls shows, 58.2 percent of Americans now believe the country is moving in the “wrong track”. Such figures would not be unusual if they referred to a president well into his second term in office. But they are a measure of a president embarking on the second year of his first term of office, and Barack Obama is now arguably the most unpopular president in modern US history at such an early stage of his presidency.

Above all, these latest polls are a reflection of America’s overwhelming rejection of big government, and Obama's emphatic embrace of highly interventionist economic and healthcare policies. As several recent Gallup surveys have shown, the United States is an increasingly conservative country. It is a nation that is actively rebelling against the most left-wing White House in US history. Barack Obama has unwittingly sparked a new conservative revolution, one that has already swept through Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey, and has the potential to take America by storm.